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▲ FatherOfCurses a day ago

I feel bad for all the inspectors who are going to have to do inspections on vibe-architected buildings in the next 12-18 months.

▲bigwheels a day ago | parent | next [-]

I don't. A lot of what they do is "make work" that slows down building homes and spaces with dilbert-esque nit picks.

▲pvab3 a day ago | parent | next [-]

I've reviewed dozens of sets of city and state AHJ review comments for housing. They sometimes take a full year and give less attention to the plans than even the worst contractor. Some aren't that bad, but many just have boilerplate review comments that are completely irrelevant to my drawings.

▲DolphinOverplan a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Civil engineering rules are mostly written in blood and costly and dangerous accidents. At least in my country. If somewhere else inspectors don't provide actual value, they should either get regulated or good riddance and AI might actually be better. I feel old, sigh...

▲bigwheels a day ago | parent | next [-]

That's not what we're talking about. By all means, follow the structural engineer's specification. But if you've ever submitted plans to a city to build a home, there is endless nonsense full of red tape: Drainage plan, soil analysis, tree survey, topographical survey, environmental site assessment, wind analysis, noise assessment, and more.

Sometimes these things make sense, but a lot of the time the work was already recently completed 3 years ago and yet they'll make you do it again. Last month I paid $3,900.00 to get 3 tiny trees and one medium sized oak surveyed here in the Bay Area. It's really about politics and control- the city wants to make a bunch of fake jobs and collect very high fees along the way.

▲teeray a day ago | parent | next [-]

Most of that stuff is important. That is, unless you like sewage pouring into the aquifers.

▲projct a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nearly everything you listed is designed to prevent your decisions, or changes to your property that haven't been identified yet, from harming you or people around you.

Removing a requirement might just leave someone else paying a much higher price, potentially with their property, their clean water, or even their life.

▲bigwheels a day ago | parent [-]

To be clear, the utility of these processes can be good - but it also gets perverted into weaponization. Local municipalities frequently deploy these regulations arbitrarily as a feature, not a bug, creating systemic friction to artificially create "jobs", drive up development costs, and suppress development.

▲mindslight a day ago | parent | prev [-]

The fundamental difficulty with regulations is that they've been written to apply the same to uncorrelated well-meaning individuals as to correlated constructively-malevolent corpos, based on some definition of "fairness" promulgated by the corpos. The things you've listed all seem pointless to you, because you're just trying to execute some small time project to make your own individual life better, not drive tens of millions of dollars of externality-producing economic activity through a loophole.

So the real answer is to reframe laws as applying to commercial operations, projects over a certain size, non-homeowners, etc. But of course the corpos cry foul over this, and would much rather you put your effort into working to repeal all regulations so they can operate without constraints.

Pragmatically, this is why I live in an area where if I wake up and decide I don't like a particular tree, it can be on the ground within a couple of hours. And most of that time is eating breakfast.

▲Schiendelman a day ago | parent | prev [-]

In the US, local inspectors are kind of like taxi medallion holders. They technically get you where you're going, but the standards are splintered from International Building Code and the whole process makes buildings far less safe than prefab components would be.

▲mihaaly a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Me too.

And at the same time I feel bad for inspectors being 5-10 years away from retirement, or worse, 5 years into the business. All inspectors in general, beyond some further construction engineering professionals and those making software for them.

▲jstummbillig a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I doubt that's going to happen.

1) Permitting is slow and, at some point, if you fuck it up big enough, the inspectors will probably take further steps, but otherwise not care much. You simply won't get a permit.

2) Who will care a lot are the builders and creditors. Building is expensive and if there's a couple of months of set back because of your fantasy drawings, that's not going to be in your favor.

Which is not so say AI planning is not going to happen. It will. But at that point it's probably mostly going to work.

▲Schiendelman a day ago | parent [-]

This is more the other way around - there are already a couple of companies using AI to submit drawings that link back to previously permitted work, in order to reduce the arbitrary decisions by inspectors by saying "you personally approved this decision in another building on x y z". It's working well.

▲jstummbillig a day ago | parent [-]

Ah yes, that I can totally see happening.